PUBLISHED WEEKLY
VOLUME 25 NUMBER 40 MONDAY OCTOBER 17, 2011
CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD GROSSMAN,
WEST HURLEY, NEW YORK
If the Occupy Wall Street people want to fill in
the blanks, they eventually might want to turn to
Richard Grossman.
Grossman is best known as the modern father
of the movement to challenge the corporate form as
a usurpation of people power.
He’s writing a book about reconceptualizing
organizing to make people's goals, strategies and
tactics commensurate with the constitutional, legal,
and structural ursurpations and traditions
accumulated since the nation's founding.
And he’s drafted a couple of laws in recent
months that the Occupy Wall Street people should
take a look at.
One would criminalize fracking.
The other would criminalize chartered,
incorporated business entities.
We interviewed Grossman on October 10,
2011.
CCR: You graduated from Columbia University in
1965. What have you been doing since?
GROSSMAN: Right after college, I was a Peace
Corps volunteer in the Philippines for a couple of
years.
I worked as an adult education teacher in
California, New Jersey and New York City.
In the 1970s, I moved to California and became
involved in the first statewide anti-nuclear initiative,
which was on the ballot in June 1976.
That took a couple of years.
I then moved to Washington, D.C. for ten years.
From 1976 to 1985, I was director of
Environmentalists for Full Employment.
At the end of that, I started publishing the
Wrenching Debate Gazette.
While publishing the Wrenching Debate
Gazette, I was helping to organize peoples’
hearings, particularly in the Southeast and Midwest.
We were combating corporate and
governmental toxic chemicals.
I moved to Massachusetts in 1990.
I kept publishing the Wrenching Debate
Gazette. But I also began researching the history of
corporations, constitutional history and law, past
people's struggles.
I co-founded the Program on Corporations Law
and Democracy (POCLAD) in 1993.
I was with that group until about 2004.
My work over the last twenty years has been to
provoke new and different conversation, thought
and action among people dissatisfied with what is
going on in the USA, among people trying to change
the nature of our work – to rethink and reframe
problems, our assumptions about this country and
our goals, arenas of struggle into which we bring our
battles, the language we use, our strategies and
tactics.
CCR: Thirty or forty years ago, when you started
this work, you were looking at the corporation
differently than you are looking at it today.
GROSSMAN: One simple way of comparing then
and now is that I don’t talk much about corporations
anymore. We live under minority rule. And the class
of people who do the governing generally could be
called a corporate class.
But 180 years ago, they were the slave master
class. One hundred years before that they were the
propertied nobility in England.
In the USA, a minority designed our structure
of governance, has been making the laws, using the
power and violence of the nation to deny the many,
to accumulate property and wealth, to replicate their
designs across generations, to groom leaders of the
next generation to continue their supremacy, to
create the educational systems, mythologies and
celebrations to camouflage and deceive, to channel
people who would be activists into realms where
even if they stop or slow down a particular
corporate state assault, they don't lay a hand on
systemic reality, don't touch the structure of
governance and law, don't question the country's
great myths.
For the past century or so, one such realm has
been regulatory and administrative law and
agencies, those vast energy sinks and diversions that
eat activists for breakfast.
CCR: You say you don’t talk about corporations
much anymore. But your most recent writing is a
draft of a law that would criminalize chartered,
incorporated business entities.
GROSSMAN: One governing mechanism of the
minority class, of the governing class, is the
chartered business corporation, and the two hundred
years of constitutional, legal and cultural privilege –
of illegitimate governing authority – that legislators
and judges have wrapped around corporate
directors.
What has been constructed by a few, the many
can take down. So as far as I am concerned, this law
is for real.
But I wrote this law for educational purposes as
well.
With the growing number of demonstrations
and occupations going on around the country, I have
not heard much analysis, or specific language, about
the essence of our problems, or about how we got
into such a usurpatory mess, about practical,
tangible steps we human earthlings can take to get
out from under minority rule so that we can govern
ourselves.
I don't hear talk about the tools we have at our
disposal, short-term and long-term goals we could
seek, strategies and tactics different from past
strategies and tactics that have not accomplished
what people have sought.
By 1995 or so, I was focusing on usurpation.
The corporate class – driving its values and
needs into law and policy – had long been making
life and death decisions that defined our
communities, defined our nation.
It had long been exercising governing authority.
According to lore and myth of the American
Revolution and the Constitution, that's usurpation.
Who has been complicit in that usurpation? Our
public officials, elected and appointed – legislators,
judges, presidents, governors, not to mention legal
treatise writers, law professors, historians.
For me, our challenge is teaching ourselves to
see beyond each single corporate state invasion and
assault and denial to recognize the structures of
usurpation that have long been in place – structures
of usurpation, of illegitimate governance, that
activists with only rare exceptions over the past
four-score years have confronted.
The second part of that challenge is this –
people who have been taught to mobilize against
single corporate state assaults – one at a time and
over and over again – start revealing and
dismantling those structures, the constitutional and
mythological underpinnings of “we the people's”
disempowerment.
And begin replacing them with values and
2 CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER MONDAY OCTOBER 17, 2011
governance structures designed to maximize liberty
for the earth and biological systems and other
species, while engendering healthy humility for the
human species.
In terms of Occupy Wall Street, I haven’t been
there. I’ve been reading about the occupation.
It's very exciting. But one thing that struck me in the
first few days were reports saying that
the protesters were focusing on corruption and
greed.
Well yes, there's no shortage of corruption and
greed going all around. But corruption and greed are
not the problem. They are diversions.
The essence of the power arrayed against the 99
percent are structures of minority-rule governance
deeply rooted, honored and celebrated, even by, I
suspect, many of the people who are occupying
Wall Street today.
I'm referring to the great myths of this nation's
founding and founders, of the U.S. Constitution and
constitutional jurisprudence, the nonsense about
limited governance, the sanctification of “the rule of
law” when lawmaking and interpreting and
enforcing have been the special preserve in every
generation of a small minority.
I'm talking about the private ordering of
economic decisionmaking, the sweeping
constitutional privileges wielded by directors of the
"creatures of law" we call chartered, incorporated
businesses camouflaged as “free enterprise” and
“the invisible hand.”
I hope that teach-ins about such realities in
Wall Street and Washington and other places are
going on. So far, I've not seen evidence.
CCR: You saw the speech on Wall Street by the
philosopher Slavoj Zizek.
He said this: “The problem is not corruption or
greed. The problem is the system that pushes you to
give up.”
GROSSMAN: Yes. But he didn’t go on to describe
the system. He didn’t talk about the mechanisms of
governance, how we got into this mess of
government by a few.
I don’t know if he believes that the U.S.
Constitution provides people seeking change with
appropriate and commensurate remedies.
I see the Constitution as a minority rule
document.
At the time the Constitution became the law of
the land, the small number of men who did the real
governing denied the overwhelming majority of
people in the thirteen states standing before the law,
the authority to vote, the ability to participate
vigorously and equally in the body politic – to drive
their values into law and public policy, to write fat
legal treatises, to make law from the bench, to
accumulate wealth.
The people of my generation – I’m almost 70 –
we’ve been struggling against corporate and
government assaults one after another, corporate
and government wars – one after another, against
usurpations galore engineered by corporate
directors.
Where can we turn for remedy? What political,
constitutional mechanisms can we use to undo
accumulated usurpations of the past, to start
governing ourselves, our communities, our states,
our nation?
For people who see these constant assaults and
denials – defined by our corporate, Earth-gobbling
culture as “legal” and “necessary” for freedom, jobs
and progress – for people agitating to stop these
wars, to stop the destruction of our communities and
escalating inequalities, to launch sane and just
transitions in energy, food – don't we have to
reconceptualize our work as humans on this Earth?
One of the tasks for my generation before we
leave the scene is to engage younger generations
about all this, starting off with this central terrifying
point – we've lost.
Fifty years ago, forty years ago, those of us who
started off being very active against all kinds of
injustices, we had a very different picture of what
this country could be like in 2011.
Today, we're not even close.
Not for lack of struggle, persistence, tenacity.
So what happened? What's to be learned from
the past half-century of organizing and resistance
and electioneering and law-writing?
Here's how I see it. Like activists and radicals
of previous generations – we have been crushed. If
we admit to this, if we internalize that crushing as
reality – I believe people will find this incredibly
liberating. That's the case with me.
Because it enables me to abandon gobs of USA
mythology, the holiday celebration stuff, the liberal
versions of steady progress under a liberty-friendly,
governance structure where, it is claimed, here the
people rule.
Generations and generations of bloody struggles
to end human slavery, to get the vote, to be seen by
the law, to be equal before the law, and on and on –
are regarded as glorious victories provided by the
exceptional liberty-loving American constitution
writers and law-makers and law-interpreters and
historians.
We were born into a structure that provides no
remedy to minority rule. We were lied to in grade
school and high school. Our energies and resources
and hopes have been channeled into making
symptoms of minority rule a little less devastating
while leaving every generation's minority rule
structures and institutions and accumulations
untouched.
Once we grasp that nettle, we then can focus on
revealing and changing.
CCR: Not only do we have to admit that we have
lost, but we have to admit that we were wrong.
Forty years ago, when you were with
Environmentalists for Full Employment, you too
believed in the power of law, the power of the legal
system to control polluting industries. You too were
arguing for regulation and law enforcement.
GROSSMAN: Well, initially I never gave much
thought to it. When I came to Washington,
D.C, I fell into the patterns of the activist
movements, of the large, existing organizations. Of
the institutions left over from the previous
generation's struggles – struggles that had been
crushed, institutions that had been neutered. I had
no idea about that at the time.
But we – like many others – were able to learn
from our experiences. At Environmentalists for Full
Employment, as we compiled data to challenge the
great “jobs vs. environment” propaganda of those
days, as we started looking into the history of
regulatory law and agencies, we began to open our
eyes.
We had been snookered and deceived and
channeled into diversionary efforts. But we started
evolving. By the early 1980s, for example, we had
pretty much turned our backs on the regulatory
system.
In our book Fear at Work, we traced some of
the relevant history. We even quoted Attorney
General Olney in the late 1880s telling railroad
corporation executives not to worry about the
Interstate Commerce Commission because it would
be a “barrier” between corporations and the people.
But you are quite right, that I was wrong about
many things, I was ignorant.
I didn’t know enough about this country's past
even to conceptualize commensurate challenges to
illegitimate power in the present.
That’s one of the reasons in 1990 or so, I set out
to learn what I could about how business
MONDAY OCTOBER 17, 2011 CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER 3
corporations became wrapped in the Constitution,
how municipal corporations – our towns, villages,
cities – were stripped of genuine governing
authority, about the way the nation's plan of
governance was designed, about legal and
constitutional evolutions, about people's constant
struggles to set things right.
Imagine – there's a so-called revolution against
England, white colonists win, and then the
cream of white colonists – slavemasters and men of
property – import the English legal system, English
jurisprudential theory, English precedent.
They plunk down structures of governance and
law crafted by the five percent of English nobility
dictating the labors of the many, vacuuming up the
Earth from Ireland to India, and ruling over England
for 800 years.
What kind of self-governance by the many with
liberty and justice for all, with consciousness of
Earth systems, with respect for people who work,
could emerge from the rigid governing structures
this nation's designers put in place?
So, when I say we lost, I'm suggesting also that
activists in every generation lost. And that today, we
and generations coming up need to explore that
reality with dispassion, without getting defensive.
When we were younger, we knew what we
knew, we did what we did. It's time to pass on what
we've come to understand. Back in 1977 and 1978, I
certainly wasn’t able to have the kinds of
conversations that I’ve been having – and trying to
provoke – over the last fifteen years or twenty years.
CCR: You have drafted legislation that would
criminalize the corporate form.
Is it a smoke bomb, or are you serious about
this?
GROSSMAN: I’m serious. All existing charters for
incorporated business entities would be null and
void. Accumulated corporate constitutional
privilege – all that illegitimate private governing
authority bestowed by legislators and judges –
would be purged.
States and the United States would be
prohibited from creating and privileging new
business entities.
For starters. And then people would have to get
together and figure out what kinds of entities we
could design that would not take over like the
Sorcerer's Apprentice.
CCR: What happens to currently operating
businesses?
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GROSSMAN: It seems to me that people behind
them should be delighted. It would be the essence of
the capitalist idea. People who want to go into
business, they could go into business. But why
should we – the rest of the people – bestow special
privileges on them?
CCR: If you believe this, why did you incorporate
POCLAD?
GROSSMAN: We didn’t incorporate POCLAD.
CCR: I thought it was a 501c3.
GROSSMAN: Technically, it was part of another
non profit corporation.
CCR: But under your proposal, even non profit
corporations would be illegal.
GROSSMAN: Right. We went down that path so
we could accept tax deductible contributions. We fit
right into the pattern. Yes. And we did talk about
that frequently as a bit of a straitjacket.
In a broader sense, much of the opposition over
the past decades – environmental groups and others
– structured themselves in the corporate form,
modeled themselves after the dominant oppressive
entity of our era.
So, you are quite right to point out the
contradiction.
But if people want to do business – isn’t the
idea of capitalism that you invest your money and
you take your risk?
And the rest of us don’t allow the people
running businesses to wrap themselves in
special privilege.
We don't allow a private ordering, private
governing, where corporate directors' decisions on
investment, production, organization of work and
technology are beyond the authority of sovereign
people.
We don't allow governance and law and
elections that enable the most important decisions
shaping our communities, dictating people's work,
determining society's relationships with the Earth,
with other species, deciding life and death, to be
beyond the people’s authority.
To get to that point, where we can try to govern
ourselves, we have to undo accumulations of
governance, accumulations of usurpations,
accumulations of illegitimate law and of illegitimate
lore and miseducation.
CCR: If we get rid of the corporate form, it will be
replaced by another form of business entity that will
accumulate wealth. What makes you think it’s the
form that makes the difference? What makes you
think they won’t be as abusive or equally abusive
concentrations of private power?
GROSSMAN: That would be the tendency.
There is no such thing as a silver bullet or a
magic fix. This draft law is a step to move to reality.
But it is also a step to open up different
conversations beyond “greed and corruption.”
To rethink the past, to see beyond symptoms to
sources and causes – toward reconceptualizing and
rethinking who we are, how we organize, what we
do.
Here in New York State, I’ve been involved in
anti-fracking struggles.
Folks in Ulster and Green counties started
meeting last March as a study group.
We named ourselves Sovereign People Action
Network (SPAN).
In early summer, seeing so many anti-fracking
people across the state pouring their time, resources
and hopes into the State's Department of
Environmental Conservation (DEC), we began
drafting a law to rip decision making from this
illegitimate agency, and drive it into our state
legislature.
Our law criminalizes fracking and
fracking-related activities.
Corporate frackers would be Class C felons.
In August, a bunch of anti-frackers from
different parts of the state, representing various
anti-fracking groups, participated in three sequential
workshops I presented on at the New York Green
Fest gathering in Western New York.
Some decided to join SPAN on criminalization.
Together we came up with the current draft of
the law. We are now creating a new coalition group
to concentrate on compelling the legislature to pass
our law.
This law is not a magic bullet, of course. We
could never pass it unless we build a mass
movement in New York.
CCR: Has it been introduced in the New York
legislature?
GROSSMAN: No. We met with a state Senator
who wanted to learn more about it but he was pretty
resistant. That’s okay. This work will take time.
CCR: Do you want to say who that is?
GROSSMAN: Not now. To his credit, he met with
us twice. He was patient and courteous, we had
some healthy conversations.
We have no illusions about the New York State
Legislature. But theoretically at least, that is where
laws are made. And that’s where sovereign people
go to instruct our representatives.
Our approach to our legislators is: we wrote this
law – now you pass it.
But we know we can’t do that until we build a
formidable statewide movement that is not only
talking about fracking as a destructive technology,
but also about illegitimate rule by a very small
corporate class.
And the same for the proposed law that would
criminalize the corporation.
What does it mean to take on the corporate
state? That struggle is not about parts per million of
this or that deadly chemical, or how to handle
deadly fracking fluid.
It's not about a particular manufacturing
process.
It’s not about campaign finance reform and
other diversions.
It’s about undoing pillars of the nation's
minority-rule structures of governance.
CCR: You are attacking the structure of private
business.
GROSSMAN: I'm talking about challenging
structures of governance and law which have
illegitimately enabled and created a private ordering
of this society – increasingly of the
whole Earth.
They have denied the many, while empowering
private government which Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, of all people, labeled fascism.
CCR: But how would capitalism adopt to this law –
if it became law? Your proposed law eliminates
limited liability for shareholders, it eliminates
perpetual life for corporations, it wipes out their
Constitutional empowerments.
But what fills the void? Let’s say you run an
airline or an electrical utility. They might restructure
as insured partnerships?
GROSSMAN: Why should sovereign people
aspiring to be self-governing bestow upon mere
creations of law eternal existence?
Why give them supreme authority – governing
powers – over their creators?
Why subsidize investors with the gift of limited
liability and other privileges galore?
If people want limited liability, let them buy
insurance.
If people want to manufacture and offer
services, and they worry about being sued, let
them take extra caution not to cause devastations
and denials.
Is it so hard to conceive of businesses as
businesses, and not as private dictatorships?
MONDAY OCTOBER 17, 2011 CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER 5
Not as deniers of human-ness? Not as pillagers of
the Earth?
We can also eliminate the permitting system so
that business people wouldn’t get permits legalizing
poisons and destructions – which is the purpose of
today's regulatory and administrative laws.
We could make sure that businesses could not
interfere in elections, lawmaking, debate over
values and public policy – in the writing of tax laws
and health laws and labor laws and laws conforming
our society's existence with fundamental Earth laws.
We could rethink the National Labor Relations
Act. That law helps make sure that in corporate
workplaces, there is no freedom of speech, no due
process of law, no equal protection of the laws, no
right to confront one's accuser.
Like all regulatory laws, it assumes the
constitutionality – not to mention the wisdom – of
corporate directors wielding the law of the land
against employees, communities, and the
earth.
It legalizes corporations denying workers
fundamental standing before the law, denying
people their basic humanity, denying autonomy
over their hands and brains merely because they are
employees.
Why should people aspiring to be
self-governing allow our states or the United States
to privilege business corporation directors to lord
over people who do the nation's work?
CCR: The progression of Grossman’s thinking –
from regulate the corporation, to challenge
corporate constitutional empowerment, to
criminalize the corporate form.
GROSSMAN: And criminalizing public officials
who have enabled and abetted usurpation. And then
rethinking everything relating to designing
institutions to help a sovereign people live in sane
and rational ways.
By the way, I take exception to what you wrote
last week – I don’t accept paternity for today's
corporate personhood fetish.
I never focused on personhood. I helped to
explain Supreme Court cases starting with
Dartmouth College in 1819 that turned business
corporation directors into usurpers.
But I would say from POCLAD's early years in
1994 and 1995, my focus was on the Constitution as
a minority-rule plan of governance, and on
usurpations galore.
And so this move to amend the Constitution
that sprung up after the Citizens United decision – I
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don’t understand it as strategy, as an educational
process, as an organizing process, as a goal.
Why validate the idea that amending the
Constitution offers a remedy for two hundred years
of minority rule? For today's corporate state?
Corporate “speech” is such a minuscule aspect of
the nation's private governance and mass denials
that have been in place since the nation was
founded.
Let's keep in mind that when the Constitution
was ratified, all states denied most people standing
before the law. They denied most people the
authority to vote.
The authors of the US Constitution included no
language in that plan of governance requiring the
United States to remove all barriers to human liberty
– to maximize liberty throughout the land.
They did craft language requiring the United
States to remove all barriers to commerce –
to maximize production and commerce throughout
the land. To impose a national economy on
communities throughout the land.
They certainly understood the concept of a
strong, centralized federal government swimming in
the preemption and prerogative authority of kings.
CCR: You were with POCLAD from –
GROSSMAN: We founded it in 1993. And I left in
2004.
CCR: POCLAD is pushing the move to amend the
Constitution.
But they are pushing to amend the Constitution
so that all corporate Constitutional rights should be
abolished.
GROSSMAN: I wish them well.
CCR: Why did you leave POCLAD?
GROSSMAN: I thought we had accomplished what
we could accomplish, given who we were.
Through our writings, our "Rethinking the
Corporation, Rethinking Strategy" workshops, we
began changing discussion on reframing issues,
reconceptualizing goals, strategies and arenas of
struggle, changing language.
I felt that 2005 was a good time for us
voluntarily to dissolve, to let folks move on in
diverse directions.
CCR: But they disagreed. And they have started
this move to amend the Constitution.
GROSSMAN: Yes.
CCR: They have gathered over 130,000 signatures.
GROSSMAN: I'm continuing to focus on
rethinking, reconceptualizing, activist work – on
getting off the defensive, on organizing campaigns
against corporate state invasions and denials in ways
that challenge its historical, constitutional, legal,
cultural and financial underpinnings – all those
pillars of usurpation.
Anyway, it's not the corporation, remember? It's
about us, people aspiring to be sovereign and
self-governing. What will it take for people to
govern ourselves?
CCR: In Upstate New York, where you live, you
are faced with the assault of fracking.
Your SPAN group drafted legislation that
would criminalize fracking. So, you are back to the
state legislature to pass this law.
GROSSMAN: We’re hoping to move the exciting
struggle to prevent the fracking of New York State
from the dead end, energy sink regulatory realm to
the place where sovereign people make law, decide
what is anti-social behavior.
We have no illusions about our state legislature.
Both houses are tyrannies. Most of the legislators
are colonized. We understand that part of our task is
to re-make our legislature, and our legislators.
And that to do this, anti-frackers and others
confronting diverse assaults of illegitimate private
governance must build a powerful state-wide
movement.
CCR: You drafted this law in August. What kind of
response are you getting from the activists on the
ground?
GROSSMAN: Our new state-wide coalition is only
now coming together, we haven't begun taking our
message across the state. I can say that whenever
any of us talks to folks, their response is – of course
fracking should be criminalized, should be declared
felonious.
CCR: Has anybody written about it yet?
GROSSMAN: I don't think so. We're still under the
radar. But I don't think it will take long to emerge.
Think back to the evolution of the anti-nuclear
movement.
The fracking struggle involves most of the giant
corporations of the country, not just business and
industrial corporations, but also law corporations
and insurance corporations.
The whole corporate class and its vast usurping
structures of governance and propaganda are behind
fracking. The reasons are clear: the corporate class
is committed to endless more. The fuel for endless
more is constantly expanding energy.
So people opposing fracking for oil and gas and
water are standing up not just to a few giant energy
corporations, but to the entire corporate class, and to
their vast corporate state, just like the anti-nukers of
yore.
In New York, people are already organized in
hundreds of groups. We think this legislation will
help unify anti-frackers, so that one day in the not
too distant, the State of New York will declare
fracking, corporate frackers, and fracking-related
activities to be Class C felonies.
CCR: The anti-nuclear movement took a decade.
Are you saying that the anti-fracking movement will
take less time?
GROSSMAN: For now, New Yorkers are
mobilizing to prevent our state from being fracked.
Some of us are proposing criminalization. We will
be provoking conversation and discussion about the
histories and realities of minority rule and
usurpation that we've been talking about here.
It's my hope that unlike the anti-nuclear
movement – that magnificently stopped the
construction of 850 nuclear radiation factories –
New Yorkers will criminalize fracking in ways that
begin to challenge the corporate state, that set new
and liberating conversations in motion, that begin
asserting we the people's authority to govern our
communities and our State.
CCR: You have a book in the works. What is it
about?
GROSSMAN: What we have been talking about.
Rethinking history, goals and strategies.
For people who want to reconfigure how this
country is run, the question is – how do we change
the activist, political work we do?
How do we rethink the language we use, the
political arenas we drive our struggles into?
How do we rethink our goals?
How do we move beyond resisting one
corporate state assault at a time – over and over and
over again, toward undoing accumulations and
structures and habits of the past?
What can we learn from valiant and persistent
people's struggles for justice, sanity and
self-governance waged since in the beginning that
have left us and the Earth in the grip of illegitimate
private governance gussied up as the cat's pajamas?
How do we talk across generations about
emerging younger and older and wiser from the
reality of losing? How do we turn ourselves into
sane, self-governing people?
[Contact: Richard Grossman. E-mail:
[email protected]]
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